Five minutes with… Evangeline Atkinson and Laura Mills

Noggin HQ is a business with a real social conscience. Tell us a little about its founding and why you felt so impelled to launch the venture.

Laura and I were both rejected for a mobile phone contract.

It turned out neither of us had a credit score, despite us having been working, renting and paying bills for many years.

The lack of transparency and control we had over the situation stuck with us.

And when we realised this ‘credit invisible’ problem was affecting an estimated 5.8 million adults in the UK, including a disproportionate number of young people, we felt impelled to work on a solution.

As you say, a number of groups within society are facing significant financial pressures, which are augmented by a poor or non-existent credit score. Just how significant an impact is such a barrier having on people’s lives?

For millions in the UK, their credit score (or lack of one) prevents them from borrowing money when they need it. In fact, it’s been estimated that one in three UK adults would now have difficulty borrowing money from mainstream lenders.

Borrowing money can be a key driver of upward social mobility; the ability to finance a car, to access employment and education or to buy a home. Credit is also often used as a vital lifeline – it has been estimated that 16 million UK adults would need to borrow money in order to afford an unexpected payment of £300 in the next 12 months.

For those locked out of mainstream lenders, higher cost alternatives are sometimes their only option, which only serves to compound the problem.

Research by CreditKarma, in 2023, found a poor credit score can cost an individual £270,000 more in interest repayments over their lifetime, which highlights the barrier this is imposing on people’s lives.

The business recently secured £710,000 pre-seed funding, which is being used to accelerate the launch of a price comparison platform. What will that do, and how will it benefit users?

Today, our price comparison platform enables people to compare and purchase mobile phone contracts, phones and SIMs from leading UK providers, with fair and transparent credit terms. We provide clarity on where credit checks are being run, and routes for those without a traditional credit score. Given the problem we’d both faced, mobile phones felt like the right place to start.

The next phase is to introduce more certainty to the process by enabling users to share extra data that proves their creditworthiness, in the absence of having a traditional credit score. This is a key step in our mission to improve access for this excluded group, disproportionately made up of young people, recent immigrants and renters.

You founded Noggin HQ in London but chose to return to your native North East to roll out its development. Why did you do that?

Our primary driver was that we wanted to create jobs in the North East.

Both being born and raised in Newcastle, we left to access jobs in London. But it always felt right to us to build Noggin here. Newcastle also afforded us greater freedom and a strong talent pool within the credit risk space. The name Noggin took its inspiration from ‘use your Noggin’, a phrase we often heard growing up.

You are childhood friends. How has that dynamic helped Noggin HQ’s nurturing?

We’ve been friends since our days at nursery school together in Sandyford. The influence of a 25-plus year friendship when building Noggin HQ has been huge.

The real driving force has been our shared vision for the impact we can deliver and the trust we have in one another.

Despite improvements to add greater diversity to the tech sector, the landscape nevertheless remains a male-dominated domain. How have you found building a business in such an environment?

It is clear there remains more to be done to ensure women have equitable access to capital.

We’d be lying if we said we hadn’t experienced some truly awful things while raising money.

That being said, the handful of bad experiences have been more than offset by countless wonderful ones. It’s also certainly not lost on us that as two women in this space, we’re often the underdog.

But we’ve learnt that being the underdog can be incredibly powerful.

 

www.nogginhq.com

LinkedIn: Noggin HQ

Pictured: Evangeline Atkinson (left) and Laura Mills (right)